Concepts

Data-aware review

Schema-only review tells you a change looks risky. Data-aware review tells you whether it will actually fail on your data — and, on request, proves it. Opt-in, least-privilege, off by default.

Tier 1 — read-only statistics

Sieve checks the change against the planner's own statistics: row counts, null fractions, distinctness, and index coverage. That is enough to know a NOT NULL will abort because 12% of the column is already null, or that a blocking lock is brief at 800 rows but minutes at 40M.

  • No row of real data is ever read — only the catalog numbers.
  • The same numbers can be collected inside your own CI, so database credentials never leave your perimeter.

Tier 2 — shadow run

On request, Sieve applies the candidate migration to a throwaway copy of the database inside a transaction, measures the real outcome — duration, table rewrites, and actual constraint failures — and then rolls back. The dangerous migration fails on a disposable branch instead of in production.

  • Non-transactional statements (e.g. CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY) are detected and skipped, not faked.
  • Rewrites are caught by watching the table's underlying file change, not by guessing.
The trust model
Tier 1 reads statistics, never rows. Tier 2 runs on a disposable copy and rolls back. The deepest review never requires standing access to your production data.
Sieve · Docs · Data-aware review